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DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 

Franklin K. Lane, Secretary 
;, . NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 



THE COASTAL SETTING, ROCKS, 

AND WOODS OF THE SIEUR DE MONTS 

NATIONAL MONUMENT 




WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFHCE 

1917 






Further papers on the Sieur de Monts National Monument may be 
obtained, with other information, from the custodian, Sieur de Monts 
National Monument, Park Road and Main Street, Bar Harbor, Me. 



JUN 13 I9tf 



v^ 



THE COASTAL SETTING, ROCKS, AND WOODS OF THE 
SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 



INTRODUCTION. 

By George B. Dorr. 

The following description of the Maine coast and appeal for the pres- 
ervation of its beauty and freedom to the public in appro]:)riate tracts 
was written— in somewhat ampler form — nearly 30 years ago by Charles 
Eliot, the landscape architect, who drew from his summers at the island, 
the home influences that surrounded him, and the bent of his own mind 
a love of nature and a will for public sen,'ice that enabled him to leave 
behind him, when his day closed suddenly in the fullness of his early man- 
hood, an enduring monument in important public work initiated and in 
ideas that other men could make their own and build into their work in 
turn. What he then said can not be better said today; the importance 
of action which he foresaw so clearly and felt so strongly has only become 
more e\'ident and more urgent with each passing year. 



THE COAST OF MAINE. 

By Charles EtioT. 

"pROM Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Cape Sable, Nova vScotia, the broad 
entrance of the Gulf of Maine is 200 miles wide, and it is 100 miles 
across from each of these capes to the corresponding end of the Maine 
coast at Kittery and Ouoddy. Thus, Maine squarely faces the gulf's wide 
seaward opening, while to the east and west, beyond her bounds, stretch 
its two great offshoots, the Bays of Fundy and of Massachusetts. The 
latter and lesser bay presents a south shore, built mostly of sands and 
gravels, in bluffs and beaches, and a north shore of bold and enduring 
rocks — both already overgrown with seaside hotels and cottages. The 
Bay of Fundy, on the other hand, is little resorted to as yet for pleasure; 
its shores in manv parts are grandly high and bold, but its waters are 
moved by such rushing tides and its coasts are so frequently wrapped in fog 
that it will doubtless long remain a comparatively unfrequented region. 
Along the coast of Maine scenery and climate change from the Massa- 
chusetts to the Fundy type. At Boston the average temperature of 
July is 70°; at Eastport it is 61°. No such coolness is to be found along 
the Atlantic coast from Cape Cod southward, and this summer freshness 
of the air must always be an irresistible attraction to many thousand 
dwellers in hot cities. Again, in contrast with the low beaches farther 



4 SII'IR DK MOXTS XATIOXAL MOXl'MEXT. 

south, llic scenery of the .Maine coast is exceedingly interesting and 
rtfreshing. The mere map of it is most attractive. Kron: the Piscata- 
(|ua kix'er, a deep estuary whose swift tides How through an archipelago 
ot rocks and lesser islands, to Cape I^li/.ahcth, a broad wedge of rock 




CopyriKht by Dr. n.jlicrt Ahh,-. 



M.nmt Desert Isla.ul as seen from an aeroplane toward sundown. rii:.t...rra„h IV -ni 
relief map made Ijy Dr. Robert Ahl)c of New York. "^ 

pushed out to sea as though to mark the entrance to Portland Ilarb.n 
the coast IS already rich m varied scenerv; hut there another tvpe wilder' 
more mtricate and picturesque, begins. Casco Bav, with^ its manv 
branches running inland and its seaward-stretching i)eniiisulas knd 



SIEUR DE MOXTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 5 

islands, is the first of a succession of bays, thoroughfares, and reaches 
which line the coast almost unceasingly to Ouoddy. The mainland 
becomes lost behind a maze of rock-bound islands; the salt water pene- 
trates by deep and narrow channels into the very woods, ebbs and Hows 
in and out of hundreds of lonely, unfrequented harbors, discovers count- 
less hidden nooks and coves. Sand beaches become rare, and great and 
small "Sea Walls " of rounded stones or pebbles take their place. Except 
at Mount Desert, great cliffs occur but seldom until Grand IManan is 
reached, while mountains come down only to the open sea at ]\Iount 
Desert; but the variety of lesser topographic forms is great. 

The general aspect of the coast is wild and untamable, an efTect due 
partly to its own rocky character and storm-swept ledges, but yet more 
to the changed character of the coastal vegetation. Beyond Cape Eliza- 
beth capes and islands are wooded, if at all, with the dark, stiff cresting of 
spruce and fir, interspersed perhaps with pine and fringed by birch and 




Copyright by National Gi'ographic Socioty. 

View of Frenchmans Bay and the Gouldsborough Hills from a mountain trail in the 

National Monument. 

mountain ash. One by one familiar species disappear as the coast is 
traversed eastward, and northern forms replace them. The red pine 
first appears on Massachusetts Bay, the gray pine at Mount Desert; the 
Arbor-vitae is first met with near Kennebec; the balsam fir and the black 
and white spruces show themselves nowhere to the south of Cape Ann, 
nor do they abound until Cape Elizabeth is passed. It is these somber 
coniferous woods crowding to the water's edge along the rugged shore 
which give the traveler his strong impression of a wild sub-arctic land 
where strange Indian names — Pemaquid, Megunticook, Eggemoggin, or 
Schoodic — are altogether fitting. 

The human story of the coast of Maine is almost as picturesque and 
varied as its scenery. This coast was first explored by Samuel de Cham- 
plain, whose narrative of his adventure is still delightful reading. Fruit- 

81507°— 17 2 



6 SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 

less attempts at settlement followed, led by French knights at St. Croix, 
French Jesuits at Mount Desert, and English cavaliers at Sagadahock; 
all of them years in advance of the English Colony at New Plymouth. 
Then followed a long period of fishing and fur trading, during which 
Maine belonged to neither New France nor New England. Rival French- 
men fought and besieged each other in truly feudal fashion at Penobscot 
and St. John. The numerous French names on the eastern coast bear 
witness stU to the long French occupation there; as, for instance. Grand 
and Petit Manan, Bois Bubert, Monts Deserts and Isle au Hault, and 
Burnt Coat — English apparently, but really a mistranslation of the 
French, Cote Brule. 

No Englishmen settled east of the Penobscot until after the capture of 
Quebec; when they did, more fighting followed in the wars of the Revo- 
lution and of 1812. The settlers fished and hunted, cut hay on the salt 




Copyright, by National Geographic Society. 

The top of Newport Mountain under whose shadow at the close of day Champlain 
must have sailed when he first reached the island. 

marshes, and timber in the great woods; then, in later times, took to ship- 
building. These, the occupations of a wild and timbered coast, still form 
its business in great part. The fisheries are an abiding resource and 
fleets of more than two hundred graceful vessels may be often seen in 
port together, waiting the end of a storm. Hunting is carried on at 
certain seasons in the eastern counties, where deer are numerous, and 
innumerable inland lakes and streams are full of trout. The large pines 
and spruces of the shore woods have long since been cut, but Bangor still 
sends down the Penobscot a fleet of lumber schooners, loaded from the 
interior, every time the wind blows from the north. 

It was in the early sixties that what may be called the discovery of the 
picturesqueness, the wild beauty and refreshing character of the Maine 
coast took place. Then, through the resort to it of a few well-known 
landscape painters, the poor hamlet of Bar Harbor leaped into sudden 
fame and it became evident that the whole coast had an important 



SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 7 

destiny before it as a resort and summer home. Now, summer hotels are 
scattered all along its shores to Frenchmans IJay, and colonies of summer 
villas already occupy many of the more accessil)le capes and islands. 

The spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people spending annually 
several weeks or months of summer in healthful life by the seashore is 
very pleasant, but there is danger lest this human Hood so overflow and 
occupy the limited stretch of coast which it invades as to rob it of that 
flavor of wildness which hitherto has constituted its most refreshing 
charm. Yet it is not the tide of life itself, abundant though it be, which 
can work the scene such harm. A surf-beaten headland may be crowned 
by a lighthouse tower without losing its dignity and impressiveness; a 
lonely fiord shut in by dark woods, where the fog lingers in wreaths as it 
comes and goes, still may make its strong imaginative appeal when fisher- 
men build their huts upon its shore and ply their trade. But the ines- 
capable presence of a life, an architecture and a landscape architecture 
alien to the spirit of the place may take from it an inspirational and 
re-creative value for work-wearied men no economic terms can measure. 

The United States have but this one short stretch of Atlantic seacoast 
where a pleasant summer climate and real picturesqueness of scenery are 
to be found together; can nothing be done to preser\-e for the use and 
enjoyment of the great body of the people in the centuries to come some 
fine parts at least of this seaside wilderness of Maine ? 



THE GEOLOGY OF MOUNT DEvSERT 

Condensed by Geurge B. Dorr from a Government report In' Nathaniel vS. vShaler 
and later study by William Morris Davis. 

[Statement apiirovod by the U. S. Geological Survey.] 

'T^HE mountains of the Mount Desert range are by far the highest 
of the many mountainous hills that rise above the rolling lowland 
of southern and southeastern Maine. Long ago this lowland, far more 
extensive seaward then, was tilted toward the south until its southern 
portion passed beneath the ocean, to form the platform of the Gulf of 
Maine, while its northern portion gradually ascended inland till it finally 
took on in the interior the character of a plateau. The tilted lowland, 
in the portion that remained above the ocean level, became scored by 
numerous stream-cut valleys, following down its gentle slope toward the 
sea; since these were excavated the coastal region has again been slightly 
lowered, carrying the whole shore line farther inland, changing 
many a land valley into a long sea arm and isolating many a hilltop as 
an outlying island. Associated with this later change of level there 
came a period of arctic climate which covered the region with a dee|) 
sheet of ice such as that which holds possession now of Greenland — then 
less arctic than New England i)ossibly. The slow southward and sea- 
ward flow of this vast mass of frozen water stripped from the land its 
ancient soil, wore down the hills, deepened the valleys, and pushed the 
accumulated debris before it to form the present fishing banks upon the 
ancient coastal plain, the Cape Cod sands, and the deep gravels of Long 
Island, besides blocking on its way the course of innumerable streams 
and damming them to create the myriad lakes and meadowlands which 
make Maine famous now as one of the greatest inland fishing regions in 
the world. 



8 



SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 



The lowland from which the mountainous hills of Maine rise up is 
not, like the coastal lowlands to the southward of Cape Cod, a recently 
emerged sea bottom, still for the most part as smooth as when the ocean 




C'«)pyright \>y National Geographic Society. 

Rock formed by coastal deposit in an ancient ocean at a period antedating any present 
trace of life on land. The strata formed by seasonal rains are still plainly to be 
seen in the foreground; the cliff beyond, of more resistant character, has been 
molten, compressed, and hardened by volcanic agencies. 

covered it. It is low in spite of having been strongly uplifted long ago; 
it is low because the ancient alpine heights that occupied it once have 
been worn down by age-long denudation and have slowly wasted away 
under the ceaseless attack of the atmosphere. 



SIEIR DE MOXTS NATIONAL MONTMEXT. 9 

The boldly uplifted range of Mount Desert is one of the most stubborn 
survdvors of that ancient highland, and the beauty of the island as seen 
from the sea, unparalleled along our whole Atlantic coast, is due to its 
persistent retention of some portion of the height which the whole region 
once had but which nearly every other part of it has lost. 

Although the noble granitic rocks that form this range rest quiet and 
cold in their age to-day, they were once hot and energetic, pressing 
their wav upward, as a vast molten mass, toward — and overflowing 
possibly — the ancient surface of the land. The massive granite stretches 
east and west across the island, inclosed wherever the attack of ice or 
sea has failed to lay it bare by rocks of a wholly different origin and 
character. At first these other rocks are seen as isolated fragments in- 
cluded in the granite; the fragments then become more frequent until 




Pegmatite dike filling a rift in the granite of Pemctic Mountain. 

solid rock of their own type, strangely twisted and contorted, begins to 
take the granite's place, as in the wonderful disj^lays at Great Head and 
Hunter's Beach Head; further on, the granite is only seen penetrating 
these other rocks in long, narrow crevices, as on Sutton Island; at last 
it ceases entirely, and the rocky floor, wherever it can be observed, is 
whoUv formed by rocks like those first seen as fragments caught and 
frozen in the cooling granite. Near the margin of its area, again, the 
granite is finer textured than where erosion has laid bare its ancient 
depths, as in the mountain gorges; for it is the way of igneous, or fire- 
formed, rocks when crystallizing from a molten state to develop smaller 
crvstals and finer texture near their boundaries, where the cooling is 
more rapid. 

This fine texture of the margin of the granite, the inclusion of angular 
and freshly broken fragments of the regional rocks within its borders, 



lO SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 

and the penetration of the regional rocks themselves by narrowing gra- 
nitic arms or dikes, clearly show that the granite is the later comer, and 
that it came molten, breaking its way with tremendous power into the 
ancient rocky crust under some vast, compelling pressure; at last, when 
the impelling forces were satisfied, it came to a halt and slowly froze into 
a rigid mass, holding in its grasp innumerable fragments gathered from 
the rent and fractured walls, whose cracks it fills. 

This granitic outburst is the greatest event in the geologic history of 
Mount Desert. It was of colossal magnitude. The energy of its intru- 
sion can not be conceived. Not that the intrusion was suddenly accom- 
plished, for no conjecture can be made as to the time it took, but that it 
was eff'ected against enormous resistances and involved the movement 
of gigantic masses. 

The granite mass disclosed in these ancient monuments of the geologic 
past is at least a dozen miles in length and four or five in breadth at 
widest, with roots far wider spread beneath the level of the present sur- 
face. No one can give a measure of the greater height to which it once 
ascended, and he would be a daring geologist who would set a limit to 
the unsounded depths from which it rose. The uprising may have re- 
quired many historic ages; it may have been relatively rapid; but that 
it was progressive, not instantaneous, is clearly to be seen upon examina- 
tion of the granite margins. 

The bare ledges and cliff's of the southeastern coast especially afford 
wonderfully clear illustrations of the molten stone's intrusive processes. 
Here we may follow the upward-driven granite forcing its way into 
narrowing cracks among the older rocks; there great fragments of the 
older rocks have been caught up in it and partly melted by its heat per- 
haps. Sometimes a block of the ancient regional stone may be seen 
divided l)y granite-filled fissures whose fractured walls can still be matched 
with certainty, striking instances of which are shown on the eastern side 
in the narrows of the Somes Sound fiord. The now rigid granite then 
yielded so perfectly under the heat and tremendous pressures acting on 
it as to penetrate the narrowest cracks and crevices, following them down 
to hairlike fineness. Nowhere in the world, indeed, may the geologist 
or traveler find better or more impressive illustration of the manifold 
processes of deep-seated intrusion than on the wave-swept ledges of the 
island's southern coast between Somes Sound and Frenchmans Bay. 



SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 



I I 



THE WOODS OF MOUNT DESERT 



By Edward L. Rand, Secretary of the New England Botanical Society and author 
of "The Flora of Mount Desert." 

A /FOUNT Desert Island has an area of over one hundred square miles. 
The ocean surges against it on the south ; broad bays enclose it on 
the east and west, and at its northernmost extremity a tiarrow passage 
only separates it from the mainland. Its outline is very irregular, 
like that of the Maine coast in general, with harbors and indentations 
ever^'where. The largest of these. Somes Sound, a long, deep fiord run- 
ning far into the land between mountainous shores, nearly bisects the 
island. There are some 13 mountains — bare rocky summits varying in 




Schooner Head and the entrance to Frenchmans Bay seen from the summit of a 
splendid cliff. The sea horizon from this point lies over 30 miles away. 

height up to over 1,500 feet and lying in a great belt from east to west; 
between them deep, blue lakes are sunk in rocky beds. To the north, 
the northwest and the southeast, the surface — of a different geologic 
structure — is relatively flat, with lower and more undulating hills and 
broad stretches of meadow land and marsh. On the southeast and east 
the mountains approach closely to the shore, ending in a coast of precipi- 
tous cliffs and bold, rocky headlands that has long been famous. No- 
where else on the Atlantic coast is there such a wonderful combination of 
natural scenery as this island possesses; nowhere is there another spot 
where shore and mountain are so grandly blended. For years it has 
been renowned as the crowning glory of the beautiful, countless-harbored 
coast of Maine. 



12 



SIEUK DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 



The forests of Mount Desert Island were once full of wealth, and full 
of wealth they still would be if the lumbermen had not done their work 
so well. High up on the mountain sides, through the mountain gorges 
along the borders of the lakes and streams, everywhere to the water 
edge, the great trees growing on the thin but rich wood-soil were taken 
out, as one may plainly see by their huge rotting stumps to-day. The 
importance of presen.nng the woods which still remain no lover of 
Nature can question. They are infinitely precious as a part of the wild 



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Glacial boulder in a forested mountain valley 70c feet above the sea. 

scenery of the place and for their wonderful attraction to the city- 
wearied man or woman in search of a summer home and resting-place.j 
What the island was in the early days of its primeval beauty, wher 
Champlain sailed along its shore and for a century after, lies far beyonc 
the possibility of conjecture now. Yet some idea of what these woods 
once were may still be gained from a few favored spots where portions 
of the ancient forest yet remain, and much of their original beauty ma} 
be brought back if steps are taken to preserve them now and protect 
from consuming forest fires the all-important humus in their soil. 

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